Word: utopian
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Mumford's vision is as Utopian as the "higher and farther" dreams of the technocrats. True believers are free to choose between the two. More skeptical readers may feel that Mumford, over the years of piling book upon book, has created something of a pyramid himself. If the view from the top is chilly, it makes more impressive those moments when Mumford climbs down and fixes his eye on his enduring earthly dream: humanity in intimate, loving touch with nature...
...purports to support. Beneath their cool New England exteriors, Alonso hints, Emerson and Thoreau-and Bronson-were as gloriously crazy as his own Don Quixote. He knows how consciences can cramp under strain, how idealism can gnarl the mind. He is not joking when he compares the 19th century Utopian experiment at Brook Farm with a Massachusetts mental hospital of today...
Kennan faults Reich for his "departure from the voice of reason" and his failure to take account of the "problems, or even the concept, of representative government." Alas, Mr. Kennan sounds rather more romantic than Reich sounds utopian. To call for "frank recognition" and "public discussion" of our problems (and the sketch Kennan offers is every bit as bleak as Reich's), for legislative reforms and basically political solutions, is romantic. Recognition and reform will not come without a change of consciousness; with a change of consciousness they are inevitable...
...dreams of personal glory. Our horror of group coercion reflects our reluctance to relinquish these dreams, although they have brought us nothing but misery, discontent, hatred, and chaos. If we can overcome this horror, however, and mute this vanity, we may again be able to take up our original utopian task...
...certainly, the world is far from ideal, parents can be mistaken and children can be correct. But as long as history continues to teach us that we live in a real world, that innumerable Utopian schemes have failed, that maintenance of a balance of power is critical to improving the chances for peace, that wars have been a major part of our history since recorded times, and that possibly, just possibly, the human being is not as noble and as selfless as our hand-wringing liberals have apparently assumed, I will tend to place more faith in those who have...